Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring vs. TotalView

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is well suited for any complicated environment where you have apps and servers across multiple clouds and platforms and products. If you have a data centre where all your apps and servers are in one single network, you could probably get away with older solutions. But for any modern, complex, hybrid-cloud microservices environment, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a must-have.

Incentivized

TotalView is well suited for an infrastructure where you are looking for a cost-effective, additive network management tool for in-depth device diagnostic information. This will not be a one-stop shop application, but it does what is advertised very well. SNMP is required for configuration and adding additional devices is quick and simple. This product also works well with Shoretel VoIP systems and allows for a full overview of connected phones along with being able to view calls on an extension/IP basis.

• SignalFX handles historical metric aggregation exceptionally well, providing a multifaceted approach to event detection based on anomalies.
• SignalFX's cost is incredibly flexible with their pricing model of DPM (data-point per minute) vs the traditional "per host" model that most monitoring SaaS use.
• SignalFX support is responsive and knowledgeable, very eager to help solve your immediate problems.
• SignalFX integrations is vast and constantly growing, making adoption easy even when multiple different open-source technologies are used in your stack.

Incentivized

• The setup is fast and easy - 500 devices in 20 minutes.
• The ability to go back a day or a week in time allows us to more easily troubleshoot the "what happened at 3 a.m. yesterday" question.
• It gives us easily accessible stats for checks and balances like device types, counts, models, serial number etc.

• Better integration with our clients (native mobile clients SDKs will be great).
• A way to easily tag filters and move them across metrics/formula.
• Alert system to easy false [alarm] and hard to configure.
• Be able to have group more dimensions (and have more values on each).

Incentivized

• If you have some complexities in your network addressing, the network diagram tool will lay everything out automatically, but it will be confusing to look at. There is a way to edit the diagram so it looks more intuitive, but it may require some time to edit everything the right way.
• TotalView will count virtual interfaces such as voice dial-peers and service modules as "ports," which counts against your license count. However, there is a way to edit each device to remove these "false positives" so it doesn't suck up licenses, but it can take some time to clean those up.

Good: Stable system with low error rate Easy to use for simple use cases Bad: UI is not very clear for complex usage Mobile view (when logged in from phone) is bad No library for .net

Incentivized

I find that learning the interface can take some time. We need a better show-and-tell on how the Teams pages, Dashboard Groups, Dashboards and charts delay. Advance SignalFlow is sometimes hard to build. Some better samples of advanced SignalFlow would be helpful. For example, Splunk SPL has a vast resource of examples.

Incentivized

They’re not for the same purpose but we’re using NewRelic and Honeycomb for monitoring purposes. NewRelic is used for HTTP client monitoring for system related throughput, error, database and external client monitoring. Honeycomb is used to monitor actual HTTP request/response values. Splunk [Infrastructure Monitoring] is used for real-time application related throughout and error monitoring.

Incentivized

The three tools listed do different things with some similarities. For us the biggest need was data analysis, semi-automatic troubleshooting, and data gathering and topology mapping. TotalView hit the most of these in the price point we were looking for. Each tool has "extras," but we felt that the extras provided by TotalView were good enough and that the other tools didn't justify the cost.

• Reduced downtime.
• Caused us to get a lot of spam when we redeployed apps and old instances stopped sending metrics. Muting alerts solves this, but people often forget to do it or do it incorrectly.
• Helped us find historical info about instances/apps.

Incentivized

• Wuite possibly the best spent money i have recommended in my 20+ year IT career.